Customer Engagement

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Research by MIT IDE Research Fellow Michael Schrage offers new insights into platform markets and network effects. Schrage postulates that the impact and influence of network effects is essential to understanding sustainable value creation in digital markets worldwide — especially, the value of customers and clients.

Companies that want to draw innovation ideas from social media need customized approaches. An approach that works on Facebook, for example, is different from one that works on LinkedIn. Companies also should emphasize the “social” by helping users create or enhance relationships. Companies that do this often benefit through people’s subsequent engagement with the company’s online innovation activities.

Content websites can more readily convert site visitors into paying customers by prompting visitors to gradually increase their social engagement with the site — using a concept the authors call the “ladder of participation.” This means thinking strategically about using site engagement to improve conversion. It also means taking an active role in encouraging users to climb the ladder of participation and move quickly up its rungs.

Beijing-based smartphone maker Xiaomi Inc. has actively involved enthusiastic customers — known as “Mi Fans” — in both software and hardware development processes. Tech-savvy users test interfaces and products as volunteers, doing much of their communication on the Internet. Customer involvement in the product development life cycle has not only helped Xiaomi reduce R&D costs but also enabled the company to cultivate a sense of participation and pride among lead users.

The McDonald’s “Our Food. Your Questions.” campaign engaged customers on social media and the web. As manager of brand reputation and public relations for the U.S. McDonald’s Corporation, Lainey Garcia helped put the campaign together. “We had to align those responses across a variety of functions — whether it be legal, supply chain, communications — and really prepare for what we knew consumers were going to ask,” she says. “That was new for many members of our organization, to really understand the nature of social media.”

In a Q&A, Carlos Dominguez, president and COO of social media management company Sprinklr, notes that while marketing is about getting people to want to talk to a company, customer service is about interacting with someone who is already invested in the brand. His goal: get companies to blend those tasks in “ways that are radically different.”

In a conversation with MIT Sloan Management Review, Michelle McKenna-Doyle, the NFL’s senior vice president and first-ever CIO, discusses the organization’s customer-focused approach to big data and analytics. She explains how the NFL works to make its employees comfortable with their own data sets.

Smartphone apps that provide consumers with helpful information — instead of simply pushing product sales — can improve users’ preference for a company. As well, mobile apps that are about useful information, what the authors call “benevelance,” can significantly impact sales at a low cost and thus improve profitability. “A benevolent app can build trust, which in turn can lead people to consider purchasing your product,” write authors Glen L. Urban and Fareena Sultan.>

Wood Turner has been working in sustainability for 20 years. In 2006 he left his work at a sustainability and brand strategy firm in Seattle to lead Climate Counts, a nonprofit incubated within Stonyfield which scores and ranks large companies on their efforts to address climate change. Now VP of sustainability innovation at Stonyfield, Turner continues his work on bringing climate-conscious practices into the core of business operations. In an interview, Turner describes the collaborative processes that make this strategy work.

Reaching out to customers on social media platforms can be a double-edged sword, particularly when the subject is sports. As airlines KLM and Delta discovered, there is a fine line to be walked between supporting the home team and offending a multitude of potential customers. Social media expert Gerald Kane offers some lessons derived from the Twitter errors made during the 2014 World Cup.

Using its own version of open innovation called Connect + Develop, Procter & Gamble is now accessing externally developed intellectual property to accelerate internal innovation. Its Live Well Collaborative, for instance, was founded by Procter & Gamble and the University of Cincinnati with the goal of specializing in research and development of products and services for the 50+ market.

Mondelez International’s brands include some well-recognized names, including Oreo, Ritz, and Cadbury. Yet as Mondelez’s vice president of global media and consumer engagement Bonin Bough explains, even a powerhouse like Oreo must work to engage its customers — and in the modern era, that means using social media. In his interview with David Kiron, Bough describes the company’s innovative methods for expanding its reach.

Companies have tried for decades to improve customer complaint resolution — without notable success. Customer expectations are rising; customers now expect positive results and not just the chance to complain. Many customers want nonmonetary remedies, such as an apology or a chance to vent. In addition, companies must recognize that they must treat every customer interaction as if it were playing out on a Facebook page or a YouTube video, because it might be.

Companies are gaining value from ethnography, the in-person study of how people actually use a product or service. Through its attention to the details of people’s lives, ethnography can be a powerful tool to help executives gain insights into their markets. Ethnographic stories can also be indispensable in helping executives rethink their assumptions about what customers care about and about overall strategic direction.

You can find just about anything on eBay: A vintage BMW, a Lear jet, a half-million-dollar yacht. From all that activity stems a lot of data and, eventually, information. In conversation with MIT Sloan Management Review contributing editor Renee Boucher Ferguson, Neel Sundaresan, senior director of research at eBay, discusses how eBay uses data and analytics at every level of the company to continuously evolve eBay’s numerous sites and services for buyers and sellers.

Brands have embraced Facebook Inc. as a key marketing channel to drive engagement and brand awareness. The question is whether some brand content creates more brand engagement on Facebook than others. A recent study coded more than 1,000 wall posts from 98 global brands, aiming for a better understanding of how different wall-post attributes impact the number of “likes,” comments and “shares” a post receives. This article offers up the results of that study, for brand managers to act on.

“If you engage customers,” says V. Kumar, “they go and they get their friends” to try out a product, too. Kumar, of the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, explains how companies can find their most influential online customers and enlist them to help promote their brands.

Many senior executives still think of social media as something you do after hours for fun, says John Hagel, co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge — they haven’t bought into the idea that social can drive the core performance of the business. He’s committed to showing them why they’re wrong.

The general interest magazine Harper’s includes a famed feature every issue called the Harper’s Index. It’s a list of facts about anything and everything in the world. Here, we present our version of an Index highlighting the facts and stats we’re intrigued by in the world of social business. Among them: the contrast between the percentage of CEOs and CIOs who believe social media is important to their business.

Online brand communities can bring customers closer to a brand, generate “buzz” and enhance brand loyalty. Yet, important as online brand communities are to consumer markets, little is known about the role they play in consumer decision-making. Although the popularity of online brand communities as a means of gathering pre- and post-purchase information continues to grow, knowledge about how to effectively manage those conversations remains scant.